Archive for the ‘The Pirate bay’ Category

In April, the UK High Court ruled that several of the country’s leading ISPs must censor The Pirate Bay since the site and its users breach copyright on a grand scale.

In the weeks that followed Virgin Media, BT, Everything Everywhere, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, BE and O2 all blocked access to the world’s largest BitTorrent site. Several of the site’s IP-addresses and domain names were made inaccessible.

In a response The Pirate Bay decided to add some new IP-addresses, effectively bypassing the blockades. This worked, until this week when several ISPs updated their blocklists to include the new addresses.

In the UK the procedure to add new domains and IP-addresses is part of a ‘private agreement,’ which apparently allows the providers to quietly add new entries when it’s deemed necessary.

As of this week 194.71.107.82 and 194.71.107.83 are no longer accessible on Sky Broadband, Virgin Media and TalkTalk and possibly other providers as well. The new addresses were added quietly by all ISPs without notifying the public.

Whether the updated filter will have any effect has yet to be seen. The Pirate Bay wouldn’t be The Pirate Bay if they hadn’t already lined up a new address, and indeed they have. During the weekend the BitTorrent site will add 194.71.107.164 (not live yet) to keep the whack-a-mole game going.

A Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak that they have enough new addresses to keep the providers busy for years to come. However, for them it’s more of a statement than anything else as there are already dozens of proxy sites that allow users to access The Pirate Bay just fine.

The above shows once again that while these blockades may stop some people from accessing a site, the really determined have plenty of options. Also, of those who simply give up on accessing The Pirate Bay, many will simply switch to other torrent sites.

Proof of the ineffectiveness of the censorship attempts was recently highlighted by several Dutch and UK Internet providers, who claimed that BitTorrent traffic didn’t decline after the blockades were implemented.

In other words, blocking The Pirate Bay is futile.

As we’ve concluded before, the entertainment industry might be better off pumping money into business models that give customers what they want, legally. The censorship route doesn’t seem to work out for now.

‘Musicians, sound engineers, video editors deserve to be paid for their work’

As expected, the High Court has ordered British ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay. Five ISPs – Virgin Media, TalkTalk, BSkyB, Everything Everywhere and Telefonica – are involved in this case, which was brought by nine record labels.…

In May, the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) and the Finnish branch of the music industry group IFPI announced that they had filed a lawsuit at the District Court in Helsinki.

The groups demanded that Finnish ISP Elisa should censor The Pirate Bay to protect the copyrights of their members. Elisa, however, refused to do so and described the blocking demands as ‘unreasonable’. But following a decision today from the Helsinki District Court they are left with no choice.

The court sided with the entertainment industry and ruled that Elisa should block access to The Pirate Bay before November 18, or face a 100,000 euro fine. Aside from various domain names, the court ruling also states that the ISP has to block access to the IP-addresses used by The Pirate Bay servers.

In a response to the ruling Elisa immediately announced that it will appeal the District Court’s decision. The ISP claims that among other things, the ruling is very unclear as it doesn’t state the specific domain names or IP-addresses that should be censored.

Elisa further says that the decision is practically irrelevant in the broader fight against online copyright infringement.

‘The industry should focus on measures that can truly reduce piracy in practice, such as making content available online at a reasonable price and without artificial delays,’ Elisa’s Henri Korpi said.

The Pirate Bay is currently listed as one of the 50 most-visited websites in Finland, and it is doubtful whether a blockade by Elisa will have much of an effect.

A Pirate Bay spokesperson told TorrentFreak there are many ways to circumvent such censorship attempts, and that the order may actually have the opposite effect to what was intended.

‘Blocks in other countries only boosted our traffic numbers, so we see this as free advertising,’ we were told.

Earlier this month Belgian ISPs Belgacom and Telenet were hit with a similar verdict, limited to blocking the Pirate Bay’s domain names. This blockade went into effect a few days ago but The Pirate Bay informs TorrentFreak that they haven’t seen a significant drop in traffic from Belgium.

In addition to Belgium, the popular BitTorrent site is currently censored in Ireland, Italy, Turkey and Denmark. An attempt to establish a similar blockade in The Netherlands failed last year because there was no evidence that the majority of an ISPs’ users are infringing copyright through The Pirate Bay.

It has always been presumed that the legal action to have Newzbin2 blocked in the UK was just the beginning for the music and movie studios. Today we have that confirmation.

A coalition of the willing, headed up by the BPI and including the major Hollywood studios, approached BT, the UK’s leading ISP, with a demand – block The Pirate Bay voluntarily or consent to a court order.

The self-styled ‘world’s most resilient torrent site’ is no stranger to censorship. It is already blocked by ISPs in Ireland, Italy, Turkey, Denmark and Belgium but the quest to put it completely out of business continues.

‘The Pirate Bay is no more than a huge scam on the global creative sector. It defrauds musicians and other creators of their wages, and it destroys UK jobs,’ said Geoff Taylor, BPI Chief Executive.

‘Unlike legal music download sites, it exposes consumers to the risk of viruses, theft of personal information and inappropriate content. We would not tolerate Counterfeits ‘R’ Us on the High Street – if we want economic growth, we cannot accept illegal rip-off sites on the internet either. We hope that BT will do the right thing and block The Pirate Bay.’

But at this stage PaidContent is reporting that BT will not simply roll over and comply with the demand for The Pirate Bay to be blocked voluntarily.

‘BT cannot block web sites willy nilly,’ said the BT source.

Voluntary action aside, BT has reportedly been given the chance to consent to a court order. If the ISP refuses it seems likely that the parties will end up in court for a mirrored re-run of the arguments in the Newzbin2 case. If there are no surprises the High Court could order a blockade of The Pirate Bay in the first half of 2012.

After a lengthy legal process the censoring of Newzbin2 finally kicked in earlier this week, but users of the site are reportedly bypassing the block by various means including the use of Newzbin2′s very own anti-blocking software.

A feature to unblock The Pirate Bay in the event that it too became blocked was already added to the client several weeks ago.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, a Pirate Bay insider laughed off the efforts to slow down the site and said that every time there are attempts at censorship the resulting publicity only gives them a boost.

Eric Schmidt described website blocking as similar to China’s restrictive internet regime. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, warned on Wednesday that government plans to block access to illicit filesharing websites could set a ‘disastrous precedent’ for freedom of speech.

Speaking to journalists after his keynote speech at Google’s Big Tent conference in London, Schmidt said the online search giant would challenge attempts to restrict access to the Pirate Bay and other so-called ‘cyberlocker’ sites that encourage illegal downloading – part of government plans to fight online piracy through controversial measures included the Digital Economy Act.

‘If there is a law that requires DNSs [domain name systems, the protocol that allows users to connect to websites], to do X and it’s passed by both houses of congress and signed by the president of the United States and we disagree with it then we would still fight it,’ he added. ‘If it’s a request the answer is we wouldn’t do it, if it’s a discussion we wouldn’t do it.’

Schmidt, who became Google’s executive chairman last month after a decade as its chief executive, described website blocking as akin to China’s restrictive internet regime.

‘I would be very, very careful if I were a government about arbitrarily [implementing] simple solutions to complex problems,’ he said. ‘So, ‘let’s whack off the DNS’. Okay, that seems like an appealing solution but it sets a very bad precedent because now another country will say ‘I don’t like free speech so I’ll whack off all those DNSs’ – that country would be China.

‘It doesn’t seem right. I would be very, very careful about that stuff. If [the UK government] do it the wrong way it could have disastrous precedent setting in other areas.’

Speaking at the same conference, the culture minister, Jeremy Hunt, said plans to block access to illicit filesharing websites were on schedule. He admitted that a ‘challenge’ of the controversial measure is deciding which sites get blocked.

Ofcom is due to present its report on the practicability of the site-blocking measures included in the DEA to Hunt in the coming weeks.

Responding to questions about Facebook secretly hiring the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to plant scare stories over Google’s privacy policies in the US media, Schmidt said he would not comment.

However, he added: ‘A lot of people – not Google employees – have looked at these claims and generally found them to be false.’

Music and film groups in talks with broadband providers over code that would bar access to sites such as The Pirate Bay

* Josh Halliday
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 March 2011 11.35 GMT

Rights holders from across the music and film industries have identified about 100 websites – including The Pirate Bay and ‘cyberlocker’ sites – that they want internet service providers such as BT to block under new measures to tackle illegal filesharing.

Under a voluntary code that is under discussion, content owners would pass evidence of illegal filesharing sites to ISPs, which would then take action against those sites.

However, the proposals are fraught with complications. ISPs are understood to be open to the idea of cutting off access to some infringing sites, but argue that an impartial judge should decide which get blocked. It is also unclear whether content owners or ISPs would be liable to pay compensation to a site that argues that it has been unfairly censored.

The communications minister, Ed Vaizey, is leading a series of talks with rights holders and ISPs, including BT and TalkTalk, aimed at developing voluntary code on internet policy, including site blocking.

The proposal is part of a contentious range of plans to curb illegal filesharing in the UK. Rights holders and ISPs have been at loggerheads over legislation due to be introduced under the Digital Economy Act, which faces a high court challenge by BT and TalkTalk on Wednesday.

BT and TalkTalk – which together have 8.4 million UK subscribers – have already spent close to £1m in legal fees on challenging the act, the Guardian understands. The government, meanwhile, is keen to push through voluntary agreements on controversial issues such as site blocking, as the act faces a delay of at least 12 months.

Issues such as how to give accused sites a fair hearing, indemnity and costs, as well as the governance structure of the code are yet to be ironed out.

‘Cheaper than notice sending would be site blocking,’ said one rights holder present at the government meetings. ‘We’re more interested in site blocking [than mass notification letters]. We don’t want to target end users, [the mass notification system] is long winded – we want something now.’

Another source at the meeting told the Guardian: ‘Site blocking is an interesting concept which we’re open to, but there are issues on how to make it work, how to give sites a fair hearing, its governance structure and indemnity. But get a judge to tell us to do it and we’ll do it.’

The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has convened a government-led working group, that comprised ISPs and search engines, to find a ‘plan B’ to avoid potential litigation arising from the blocking of websites accused of illegal filesharing.

In December, the MPA filed an injunction forcing BT, the UK’s largest broadband provider, to throttle users’ access to Newzbin2 using the UK Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act. Although the a voluntary set of principles is preferred to the legal route, the high court is expected rule in June on whether BT should block access to the site.

The Pirate Bay Appeal Verdict: Guilty Again: “The verdict against three people associated with The Pirate Bay just been announced. The Swedish Appeal Court found Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström guilty of ‘contributory copyright infringement’ and handed down prison sentences ranging from 4 to 10 months plus damages of more than $6.5 million in total.

In April last year the Stockholm Court sentenced the ‘The Pirate Bay Four’ to one year in prison and a fine of $905,000 each. The defendants immediately announced that they would appeal the decision and the case went before the Appeal Court two months ago.

Today, Friday November 26, the Swedish Appeal Court announced its decision. Compared to the District Court ruling, the court has decreased the prison sentences for the three defendants, but increased the damages that have to be paid to the entertainment industries.

‘The Pirate Bay has facilitated illegal file-sharing in a way that results in criminal liability for those who run the service. For the three defendants the court of appeal believes it is proven that they participated in these activities in different ways and to varying degrees,’ the court stated.

The court did consider the individual input of all three, which resulted in varying prison sentences ranging from 4 to 10 months . The total damages of 46 million kroner ($6.5 million) will be equally shared among Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström.

Peter Sunde (born September 13, 1978) alias ‘brokep’

Guilty of contributory copyright infringement

8 months in prison

A share of the $6.5 million in damages

Fredrik Neij (born April 27, 1978) alias ‘TiAMO’:

Guilty of contributory copyright infringement

10 months in prison

A share of the $6.5 million in damages

Carl Lundström (born April 13, 1960)

Guilty of contributory copyright infringement

4 months in prison

A share of the $6.5 million in damages

The total damages are higher than in the District Court ruling. ‘This is because the court of appeal, to a greater extent than the district court, accepted the plaintiff companies’ evidence of its losses as a result of file-sharing,’ the court noted.

All Nordic entertainment industry companies get the entire amount they asked for, and the remaining companies get about half of what they requested.

The fourth defendant, Gottfrid Svartholm, is not included in the verdict because he was absent at the court hearings due to medical circumstances. His case will be reviewed later.

From the verdict it also appears that the court chose for prison sentences to set an example, but that such sentences are generally not fit for copyright related violations.

‘They’re giving us jail even though it’s not the right thing for the ‘crime.’ It’s just to scare people. That’s what you did in the 1600s…,’ defendant Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak.

‘This was a political trial from the start and it must be resolved politically,’ Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Pirate Party said in a response to the verdict. ‘The public has lost all confidence in the justice system in these matters, and it is beyond sad that the courts still persist in running special-interest justice.’

Entertainment industry insiders, on the other hand, applauded the verdict. ‘It’s a relief that the court of appeal finally affirmed that you’ll be sent to prison if you carry out this type of activity,’ movie industry lawyer Monique Wadsted said.

Although none of the defendants has officially commented on how to proceed, it is very likely that this will not be the end of the case. It is expected that it eventually will go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Defendant Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that they are all appealing at the Supreme Court as soon as possible.

Whatever happens next, not much will change for the users of the popular BitTorrent indexer. The Pirate Bay website will remain online and operating as usual. None of the defendants are involved in the site anymore, and all assets are reportedly owned by the Seychelles based company Reservella.

A Swedish appeals court on Friday upheld a ruling against three men behind file-sharing website Pirate Bay, cutting their prison sentences and raising the fine.

So far, the file-sharing platform Pirate Bay – the ‘world’s most resilient bittorrent site,’ as it bills itself – is still live. But its days may be numbered, thanks to a verdict handed down on Friday in a Swedish appeals court.

A lower court had last year sentenced four men who co-founded and ran Pirate Bay to one year in jail and a total fine of 32 million crowns ($4.57 million, or 3.45 million euros).

The Svea appeals court said in a statement on Friday it had reduced the prison sentences by varying degrees, but raised the fine to 46 million crowns.

The new judgement related only to three men – Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom – as a fourth, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, was ill and could not take part in the proceedings.

Marten Schultz, law professor at the University of Uppsala, was unsurprised by the verdict. ‘Most lawyers are not that surprised that they were convicted,’ he told Deutsche Welle. ‘What is maybe a bit surprising is that the amount of damages was so high. It’s really incredibly high – a really staggering amount.’

Schultz said that safeguards usually used to protect private citizens in similar cases had been bypassed.

Christian Engstrom, member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party, a civil liberties party that has made a flagship cause of the Pirate Bay case, the verdict proved that corporations have too much influence in Swedish law courts.

‘It’s very disappointing, because it proves that when it comes to corporate cases, you can’t trust the Swedish legal system,’ he told Deutsche Welle after the ruling was announced in Stockholm. ‘The lawyers for the record companies are friends with the judges, both in the lower court and in the appeals court. They belong to the same societies for copyright, which is a lobby organization for copyright lawyers. This corruption unfortunately leads to the fact that you can’t get a fair trial in copyright-related issues in Sweden today.’

Confidence problems

‘Generally speaking, I do have a lot of confidence in the Swedish system,’ Engstrom added. ‘But I was hoping for a different verdict – I was hoping the appeal court would re-establish, or at least start the work of re-establishing confidence in the Swedish court system in copyright issues.’

Predictably, the music industry is taking a very different view. Frances Moore, chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), was particularly uncompromising when the judgement was announced.

‘Today’s judgment confirms the illegality of the Pirate Bay and the seriousness of the crimes of those involved,’ Moore said. ‘It is now time for the Pirate Bay, whose operators have twice been convicted in court, to close. We now look to governments and Internet service providers to take note of this judgment, do the responsible thing and take the necessary steps to get the Pirate Bay shut down.’

Higher court

The district court had ordered them to pay the damages to a number of content providers, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI und Columbia Pictures. The providers had sought 117 million crowns – substantially more than the 46 million they were awarded.

The four defendants claimed they cannot be held responsible for the material exchanged via their site, which was launched in 2003, since no copyrighted material is stored on its servers and no exchange of files actually takes place there.

But the prosecution argued that by financing, programming and administering the site, the four men promoted the infringement of property rights by its users.

Friday’s verdict means the defendants must now decide whether to take their case to a higher court. ‘At the press conference, one of the judges was asked whether the case contains elements which would make it likely that the supreme court would take it,’ Engstrom said. ‘And she said, ‘Yes it does.’ So in all likelihood this will go to the supreme court.’

Bank robbers use roads, right?

One of the most important of these elements is what is known as ‘secondary liability’ – the extent to which Pirate Bay is responsible for illegal activity carried out through its site.

‘The core issue is whether any service provider can be sentenced for what people who use the service do,’ said Engstrom. ‘It’s important to remember that Pirate Bay is used to share a lot of material completely legally. It’s potentially very damaging to the Internet as a whole that the providers of infrastructure can’t know if they will be held liable for what other people do.’

‘Messenger immunity has been a guiding principle since Roman times,’ Engstrom pointed out. ‘All kinds of infrastructure are used to commit crimes. Bank robbers use the roads, people send drugs through the postal service. If you start making service providers liable for what people do with the services, it significantly increases the legal uncertainty.’

Pirate Bay – which currently has over 24 million users – organizes the exchange of so-called BitTorrent data, small packets of data which allow the transfer of much larger files direct from one computer to another. The site explicitly leaves it up to the person doing the downloading to clarify copyright issues, including payment.